


These Days of Dust

by lady_ragnell



Series: Post Finale Fics [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Gen, Post canon, Reincarnation, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 01:46:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin waits through lifetimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Days of Dust

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [These Days of Dust](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8535808) by [archeoptah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/archeoptah/pseuds/archeoptah)



> **Warnings:** This is a fic that deals with both Merlin's loss of Arthur and with his reincarnating over time (as opposed to immortality). As such, the character death tag refers to both of them.
> 
> Title from Mumford and Sons, "I Will Wait." This is very compressed headcanon from a much longer reincarnation fic I may someday write, because I tend to like reincarnation more than immortality and wanted to work out how that might still comply with the given canon.

Merlin can’t bring himself to stray far from the lake at first. He leaves long enough to find food and shelter, to find a way to watch those he cares about from afar, to force himself to stop waiting, but he always comes back.

People start to find him—Percival was first, just in time for Merlin to tell him what had happened and then send him away to Camelot and Gwen, but he isn’t the only one. The Druids come, either to stare or to pity him, he doesn’t care which. He mostly wonders if they feel as betrayed as he does by this destiny they’ve all been hoping for. Wasn’t Arthur’s golden age meant to stretch on until they were old men? Weren’t they supposed to be able to glory in Merlin’s magic together, and bring it back to its rightful place in Camelot? Gwen does it, and he loves her for it, but it feels wrong, still.

Maybe Kilgharrah lied all these years, though. Merlin doesn’t dare ask if the destiny he was fighting towards, the hope of a better future, was just a story he kept believing long after he should have stopped. If that isn’t true, what if Arthur won’t come back when he’s needed?

(When Albion needs him. He’s _needed_ always, but destiny never seems to have cared what Merlin needs.)

*

Niniane comes after a year, a bright golden-haired girl of perhaps ten with a beguiling smile and a stubborn set to her jaw. She’s dressed like a merchant’s daughter more than a Druid, but the first thing she does when Merlin sees her is to hold out her hand and stare at it golden-eyed until it fills with water. “I want you to teach me,” she says, the words tumbling out over each other.

He’s shaking his head before she finishes speaking. “I’ve never taught anyone. Go to the Druids for that, they would be more than willing to take you in if your parents have thrown you out.” Magic may be legal again, but it’s harder to change minds than laws.

“They say you’re the most powerful sorcerer anyone has ever known. I wish to be taught by the best.” Her eyes are almost the same unreal blue as Arthur’s, and for a moment Merlin is fool enough to wonder if Arthur fathered a child back when Merlin was new to Camelot.

She doesn’t have to be Arthur’s daughter to be worth teaching, and as much as his every instinct cries out to do nothing more than wait for Arthur until the trees and plants grow to bind him where he sits, Arthur isn’t his only responsibility. The least he owes the people of magic, after all these years, is his knowledge.

Niniane drinks in all the knowledge he can give her for two years before she slides a knife between his ribs afternoon in between one spell and the next. “Now you’ll know how it feels,” she hisses, and it’s only then he sees Nimueh looking out through her eyes.

*

Coming back into his memories is less of a surprise than dying in the first place was.

Merlin is nine years old and his name is Tom, and he’s stocky and light-haired and as full of magic as he ever was. His parents are farmers in a Nemeth that now pays homage to a High Queen, one who has gently been bringing Albion under her protection since Tom was a child. When he suddenly can’t think of the Queen as anything but _Gwen_ , when he starts waking in the night screaming for Arthur, his parents think it a fanciful phase, but it doesn’t take Merlin long to accept the truth and settle as best as he can into being two people at once.

When he’s old enough, he goes back to the lake. There’s no sign of Arthur, of course, and no sign of Niniane either, but there are children playing by the lakeshore where there never were in the days Merlin went to visit it. He asks one of them why they come to play their games without anyone watching over them in case of wild beasts, all of them look at him as if he’s simple and tell him there’s a sorcerer waiting for a king, and he watches over the children.

This time, when Merlin stays by the lake, it’s to make their stories true. He pretends to learn magic from the Druid teachers as they pass, and thinks some of the older ones may recognize who looks out from this stranger’s face, though they never mention it. He does tricks for the children, and never marries, and tries not to hear the stories of the rest of his friends dying. At least for Gwen and Leon, old age takes them.

Merlin never stops looking out towards Avalon, but it feels so far away, and he didn’t even get a brief respite there after he was killed.

Perhaps those ten years are all he’ll ever have of Arthur.

He thinks of Niniane, though, and himself, and wonders if he just has to wait for them all to come back, every last one of his lost friends and enemies until finally Arthur among them.

Tom dies after a longer life than Merlin’s first, and Merlin never sees anyone else he knows, or at least never has it confirmed.

*

Merlin is fifteen and a sailor’s redheaded son to the north of Albion, and his name is Arthur. It’s a stab in the gut whenever he hears the name, and he leaves home as soon as he can, telling his mother he’ll write and never doing it.

Some of the forest by his lake is cleared out for a little settlement, the children Tom used to protect about their play parents themselves, now, ones who look at Merlin askance when he says he’d like to stay. His magic is sluggish and weak, this lifetime, and he has the panicked fear that it will fade with each one until he’s left waiting for Arthur with nothing of himself to help him along.

He wakes one night when he turns eighteen screaming with the vision of a griffin attacking their settlement, the shutters rattling at his windows.

An old, old woman trains his Seeing until he understands Morgana’s curse, understands how lonely and frightened she must have been and why it drove her to such lengths. The future winds itself in with two lifetimes of the past and all he did and saw in them, and his teacher never lets up, never gives him the mercy of something to block the visions.

It isn’t until he sees her death in his dreams that he recognizes her as Niniane, and he never asks if she knows who he is, because it doesn’t really matter.

Merlin stays by the lake, and this time there are a few others he recognizes. One of them, a little girl who glories in her magic and never looks as if she trusts Merlin, he thinks must be Morgause, but if she remembers she never tells him. Sometimes, when he is at his worst, she sits with him as he looks out towards Avalon, and her presence is more a comfort than that of an old enemy should be.

What does enmity matter, though, when they’re the only ones who could possibly understand?

*

Albion will never be in enough need to bring Arthur back. Gwen’s reign is long over, life after life distancing Merlin from Camelot and that first, most important life, and while there are conflicts, the battles of kings and queens, Avalon shows no sign of stirring and letting forth its king.

Merlin gives up on the lake, after a while, only visiting it once or twice a lifetime and instead focusing on looking for old friends, whether they remember him or not. There are wounds to heal, apologies to make and receive, explanations that will take lifetimes to tell, and when Arthur comes back (as Merlin must believe he will, because without Arthur what purpose is there to this long, lonely existence?) they will all be ready. They will all be _together_.

There will be a second chance for all of them, he must believe that, and the second time they will shape destiny into something of their own making. It owes them, after that first life.

*

Merlin is old, and feels every ache of it. He didn’t look like that first self when he was young, named James and as cocky as Arthur used to be before he remembered at twenty-three, but now that he’s old and bearded he can’t help noticing the resemblance to his most common disguise from back in Camelot.

It’s taken him this long to visit the lake, this lifetime, because after so long it hurts to look at it. This time, though, there’s the sense of something shivering in the air, Avalon closer than it’s been for years upon years.

Arthur isn’t coming yet, but soon. Maybe in Merlin’s next lifetime. Maybe it will be all of them, and the chance Merlin longs for.

He sits by the lake to wait.


End file.
